2015 was the year of the email newsletters comeback

Email is re-emerging as a primary point of entry for content publishers. Sites such as Quora and Medium have essentially replaced their homepages with excellent digest emails, while more and more individuals have started to migrate to tools like MailChimp and TinyLetter to create what are effectively private blogs.

As a real“email hater” myself — I try to escape from as many emails as I can — I have to admit that I now have a few newsletters that I really look forward to read every week. Meanwhile, Charged, The Modern Desk (to name a few), are pretty great. They are like little condensed blog posts that are pushed into an app that you will never delete: your email client.

It is extremely easy to miss something on Twitter, easy to not visit a website one day (or just find nothing new when you go there), easy to scroll through Tumblr without clicking or noticing something good, but I almost never miss an email. I still prefer to use my RSS reeder (yes: RSS also had a comeback this year), but RSS feels different; emails feel precious, curated, delivered to you by someone who seems to truly care.

Payton is right when he describes them as“private blogs” — he could also have mentioned that they are offline web pages: they sit here in your inbox and you don’t have to go read them, they come to you.